Facebook insists that it’s not listening or watching the whole time, but many don’t believe the company.

Facebook is offering new video-calling devices powered by artificial intelligence. Judging by reviews, privacy concerns are going to make them a tough sell.

In its basic version, the Facebook Portal sells for $199, while the bigger Portal+ is priced at $349. Facebook started shipping the products on Nov. 8, after announcing them last month.

The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern distrusted the Portal so much that she refused to even bring it into her home. “I just couldn’t bring myself to set up Facebook’s camera-embedded screen in the privacy of my family’s home,” she wrote….

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have hidden an undisclosed number of covert surveillance cameras inside streetlights around the country, federal contracting documents reveal.

According to government procurement data, the DEA has paid a Houston, Texas company called Cowboy Streetlight Concealments LLC roughly $22,000 since June 2018 for “video recording and reproducing equipment.” ICE paid out about $28,000 to Cowboy Streetlight Concealments over the same period of time.

‘People who travel without a ticket, or behave disorderly or smoke in public area will be punished according to regulations.’

Imagine the sum of your existence shrunk to a score that is constantly being updated and affects every area of your life –your social and economic status, access to better schools and employment, a nicer apartment, access to newer rental cars, and even friendships. You might laugh it off and point out you have seen this one in that “Black Mirror” episode.

An episode in the third season of the British sci-fi series titled “Nosedive” is indeed about a world where people can rate each other in real time based on every interaction they have, and the score each one gets determine his quality of life. Relax, you may say, it’s totally fictional. But what if I tell you such a world not only really exists, but is also much worse than the fictional one…?

Purdue University’s SIMBA Labs has developed a camera-to-human surveillance program called PHADE otherwise known as Private Human Addressing. The name of this new program, seems appropriate as everyone’s privacy will soon phade fade away (pun intended).

Before I discuss PHADE I would like to point out a few important facts….

A privacy expert tasked with protecting personal data within a Google-backed smart city project has resigned as her pro-privacy guidelines would largely be ignored by participants.

“I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, wrote in a resignation letter to Google sister company Sidewalk Labs.

“I felt I had no choice because I had been told by Sidewalk Labs that all of the data collected will be de-identified at source,” she added….

The end of this month (31 October 2018) will mark the 10th anniversary of the online posting of the now-famous white paper by “Satoshi Nakamoto” outlining the concept of “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” This is an opportune occasion to compare what Bitcoin has achieved with what Satoshi wanted to achieve. While Bitcoin’s rise to a market valuation of over $100 billion is certainly a remarkable accomplishment of one sort, the founder had other aims….